The present invention relates to the field of contact management, more particularly, to generating a recipient list for propagating contact information changes based on contact metrics involving a user and the recipients on the list.
Users of such services as email, post, IM (instant messaging), phone, and the like commonly build up a list of contacts over time. This list of contacts can be records of other users' contact information that are kept in touch with over these mediums. Over time, some contacts can become obsolete (i.e., the user no longer keeps in touch, or the contact information has changed). Some situations can cause a user to change their contact information, causing their contacts to have outdated information. Such situations can include changing their phone number, switching service providers, changing their email address, moving residences, or the like. It can therefore be important for a person having changed contact information to convey this change to those communicators whom they wish to remain in contact with.
Current solutions to this problem can involve sending a mass communication (e.g., an email to all contacts, an IM Notification to everyone in a contact list, a text message to a group of people, generating a postal letter and sending it to all address book contacts using a mass mailing feature of a word processing program, etc.) to all of the contacts in a contact list. Sometimes artifacts such as VCARDS are conveyed within the mass communication to make it easier for a communication recipient to update the communicated contact information.
Determining a set of people based solely upon a presence or absence in a contact list is, however, a somewhat flawed approach, since a contact list often contains obsolete contacts and/or does not contain other people who are often in contact with the communicator. Overcoming these shortcomings requires extensive manual grooming of a contact list before updated contact information is sent, which many users lack the time or the inclination to perform. An automated approach yielding more accurate results that assists a user in determining a set of people who are to be sent contact information updates would be very useful.